Despite its reputation for new European music, the ECM label has always been a place where adventurous Americans can find a sympathetic ear. Pianist Vijay Iyer wrote the suite for string quartet, piano and electronics that forms the centrepiece of his impressive debut for Manfred Eicher’s label back in 2005, but has waited until now to record it. Rather than conventional dots on paper, Iyer [...] primes his musicians with what he calls a ‘gesture palette of notated material’ that introduces chance and mutation into the music, aided and abetted by the composer at the piano and operating a laptop. If that all sounds drily intellectual, the results are startingly fresh and ear-opening, and the piano pieces that bookend the suite are the work of a pianist with a clear and authoritative voice.Cormac Larkin, Irish Times

He is 81 now and was 76 when the concert took place, but his playing retains all the fine judgement of line and time and the tensile strength that distinguished the work of his earlier years, along with an exquisite and wholly characteristic ability to skirt the fringes of dissonance. If you were to play this and ‘Open, To Love’ to someone who had never heard him before, I would defy them to say which was by a man in his fourth decade, and which by one in his eighth.
The record consists of four of Bley’s own compositions and an encore of Sonny Rollins’s ‘Pent-up House’. ‘Far North’ and ‘Way Down South Suite’, 17 and 16 minutes long respectively, merge into each other without a break and are intense, discursive pieces full of movement and surprise, kaleidoscopic in their effect on the listener. [...] I can’t think of another pianist so effective at creating drama by alternating legato and staccato phrases — sometimes within the same arc — while sustaining a strong underlying lyricism, and his wonderfully precise touch is beautifully captured by the recording (four decades after his first ECM session, Kongshaug is once again the engineer). Bley neither ingratiates himself nor sets out to shock. He just plays, with a sinewy restlessness and an apparently inexhaustible fund of ideas, and he has spent his long career proving that a natural reserve and an innate warmth are not mutually exclusive. I’m pretty sure this will be one of my albums of the year.Richard Williams, The Blue Moment